mentalhealth

La Salle’s troubling lack of counseling services for fifth-year students

Uncategorized

Elizabeth McLaughlin, Editor

La Salle boasts multiple 5-year programs. But they don’t offer free counseling services to students in their fifth year. Why?

Many students in their fifth, and final, year of their program — whether that be Communication Sciences and Disorders, Secondary Education or Social Work, to name a few — also attend La Salle for their undergrad. In other words, these students are used to utilizing services such as the counseling and health centers as means to cope with their ever-stressful lives in both academia and the workforce. Some of them build profound and valuable relationships with their counselors, meeting with them on a weekly basis.

These students continue paying tuition, obviously, and they also continue paying the university fee and student activities fee — but once they officially enter their fifth year, they can’t see their counselor anymore. Now, if their counselor has a private practice, they have to pay out-of-pocket to continue maintaining their mental health. If their counselor doesn’t have a private practice, students are met with a dead end. 

According to Thervo, an average therapy session in Philadelphia costs between $60-$120 per session. Say a student meets weekly with their counselor throughout the school year; based on two 16 week-long semesters, that rounds out to $1,920 to $3,840 spent out of pocket on therapy per year. For many of my out-of-state friends, their insurance won’t cover a dime of therapy costs. I don’t know a single college student who could manage that extra cost on top of everything we already pay to this university. 

So why doesn’t La Salle offer the same counseling and wellness services to its fifth year students that it does to its undergraduates? In September of 2018, La Salle received “a three-year Garret Lee Smith Suicide Prevention Grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Systems Administration, worth over $300,000.” Those three years have passed, and I’m unclear on exactly how La Salle utilized this grant. I have researched and read the plans published by La Salle and the grant manager from 2017 and 2018, but I have yet to find any updates on the program since then.

All of that information on the grant is only supplementary to my point: that La Salle provides no public reason as to why fifth year students cannot access student counseling or wellness services. Instead, they tell students who utilize these services throughout their undergrad, “Good luck! We won’t be helping you anymore.” Or, at least, that’s the impression that one of the students entering her fifth year of the Communication Sciences and Disorders program is under. “I still pay all my fees; I’m actually paying more now than I ever have for school. I pay $1,050 per credit and for some reason, I can’t keep seeing my counselor. It’s beyond frustrating.”

And she’s right, it is beyond frustrating because it’s a liability. Is it really in La Salle’s best interest to not offer free counseling and wellness services to its overworked and underpaid (if at all) graduate students? Another student entering her final year of the five year Communication Sciences and Disorders program showed me her current balance. $9,450 in tuition for 9 credits, plus a $285 “general university fee.” What is that “general” fee going toward, if not a service to help manage depression, anxiety and all the stress that comes with being in an accelerated program?

On Sunday, May 1, I worked my last ever event as a tour guide. Before the admitted students arrived to submit their deposit and commit to La Salle University, my fellow ACEs and I went around the quad, putting up signs with various fun facts about our school. One of the signs reads, “La Salle offers multiple five-year programs.” But what we don’t tell incoming students is that we can’t offer them free counseling services during that rigorous fifth year for their mental wellbeing. We don’t tell them that they’ll reach their final year, feeling more overworked and exhausted than they’ve likely ever felt in their entire life, and that they’ll have to work that out on their own.

Why not?

Social media: building up society and breaking down mental health

Commentary

Meghan Cain, Staff

Social media has become a dominating force in our society and is being introduced at increasingly younger ages. Knowing the influence that social media has over its users, it is no surprise to me that overuse of social media was rated number one on the 2020 Top 10 Child Health Concerns During the Pandemic List. Especially following the pandemic, which allowed for an overwhelming amount of free time for a lot of kids and adolescents, social media use is continuously growing.

In my opinion, the most harmful aspect of social media is its effects on the mental health of kids and adolescents, negatively affecting their confidence. I am currently working on an independent research study seeking to find the correlation between social media use and adolescent girls’ body dissatisfaction, social comparison and internalization of the thin ideal. The findings have shown so far that there is a positive correlation between social media use and negative self-feelings, which is worrisome considering the age at which social media is being introduced nowadays.

Social media robs children of their youth, and for adolescents, who are already experiencing a confusing period in their lives due to puberty, social media increases exposure to unrealistic idealized bodies and pressures them to change their appearances. A previous study of social media use and adolescent body image has found that “time spent using social media… is associated with greater preoccupation with how the body looks, which is, in turn, associated with more negative feelings about the body.” This finding supports the idea that social media has a negative influence on youth and their self-satisfaction, which is critical during such a vulnerable stage in their life. 

While there are many arguments against social media that expose the harms associated with it, there are also positives that come from social media, which leads this to be a controversial topic. One study that I have found supports social media in stating that it has “been used by adolescents to increase social connectivity, broaden social relationships and for entertainment… social media is a potentially inexpensive way to have conversations about mental health, important information and challenge stigma… to promote help-seeking for mental health difficulties.” There are clearly benefits of social media as it increases access to mental health awareness and information on coping, as well as increasing socialization and maintaining friendships. Through the interviews with young users in this same study, it was found that social media can be a way to promote mental health, but also to decrease it. Adolescent users had stated that “social media can fuel cyber-bullying and that could lead to problems like suicide, anger and depression.”

This theme leads me to a second study which found that “adolescents who spent more time on screen activities were significantly more likely to have high depressive symptoms or have at least one suicide-related outcome.” Additionally, electronic device use was significantly correlated to all four suicide-related outcomes, which are feeling sad or hopeless, seriously considering suicide, making a suicide plan and attempting suicide. There is an abundance of information that supports either side of the social media argument, which leads to a bit of controversy.

Social media is such a common aspect of our everyday lives that youths being on electronics or social media is normalized overall — a community-based issue, as social media has become ingrained into our society and would be difficult to remove.

As far as addressing this issue goes, spreading awareness of the harms of social media may provide some benefits. In terms of solving the issue, I do not think that much can be done on an individual level to decrease the detrimental effects of social media as a whole, but steps can be taken to ensure that one is using social media in healthy ways, as well as monitoring children and adolescents’ use. To solve the issue from the root, social media should not be introduced at elementary age, and when it is introduced it should be monitored. In other ways, the issue can to be addressed by the platforms’ corporations. One great strategy that I have seen in the news recently is actually from Facebook. The corporation is introducing features that promote wellbeing on the Instagram app, which is a branch of Facebook, such as prompting young users to take breaks. Another feature will be to “nudge” young users when they are looking at photos that may harm their well-being. There will also be optional parental controls that allow guardians to supervise what their children are doing online, which may be a bit controversial. In my opinion, these controls can be a great way to promote healthy social media use, but it also depends on what exactly the guardians will be able to see. The best way to monitor would be to make sure the children are not spending too much time on social media, and putting parental control locks on certain media to ensure they aren’t being exposed to harmful content.

In conclusion, social media use amongst our youth is an issue that I find to be important, and is one that I feel is only just beginning to gain traction. While we are slowly making advances in the promotion of healthy media use, we have a long way to go as a society. There are numerous arguments regarding the negative impacts of social media use on youth, but there are many to support it as well, so this issue must continue to be explored. I am trying to do my part in addressing the issue by conducting my independent study, and hope to use the results to make an impact.

A case for meditation

Commentary

Elizabeth McLaughlin, Staff

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Our phones can serve as a bottomless pit of distractions, leaving us drained and dissatisfied. Meditation can help.

Do you have trouble focusing in class? Do you find that you can’t muster up the courage to do that assigned reading? Do you ever find yourself exhausting your Twitter feed, closing out of the app, only to reopen it seconds later, expecting something different? Do you find yourself in a constant negative feedback loop of ennui? First, we’ve all been there. Second, you should try meditation.

To be clear, the central purpose of this article is not to claim that you should meditate, but rather to illuminate the struggles we face, especially in a post-Zoom world, while offering an empirical prescription to those ailments. This prescription has served me well, but in no way do I want to act as a meditation evangelist. Simply put, you can take it or leave it.

Let’s briefly discuss some of the struggles of being human. Listlessness is characterized as a lack of interest or energy; I believe that we are engaging in an attack on our energy levels every time we unlock our phones. The adult brain can store between five and nine items in short term memory. You can open Twitter, and by the time you see your tenth tweet, it is very likely that you can’t remember the first. More importantly, when presented with much more than five to nine pieces of information at a time, it’s easy for our brains to get overwhelmed. It’s a shame that social media, by design, presents you with an infinite amount of information at once, so long as you enable it. It’s a shame because our prefrontal cortex — which evolved millions of years ago to mediate the functions of goal articulation, goal retention, and self-discipline — is no match for computers. When you put it that way, it’s no wonder that we are turning our thumbs arthritic in the name of scrolling.

But it doesn’t need to be so bleak. Sure, we’ve designed a computer that can accurately anticipate our needs and desires and use that information to present us with our own virtual reality. Big deal. Still, the quest to manage stress isn’t completely hopeless. I was surprised to learn that the term “stressed out” was invented sometime in the last century. Before we had a name for it, did people feel stressed out? Of course they did, but their stress was informed by extremely different circumstances, and they just didn’t identify that overwhelmedness like we do. Nonetheless, holding all circumstances equal, there is one timeless practice that, if done correctly, is almost guaranteed to reduce stress. You guessed it: meditation.

You’ve probably heard that before; that meditation is worth trying, whether it was from a friend, a fellow netizen, or a public figure. Neuroscientist Sam Harris says meditation is “the practice of learning to break the spell and wake up;” I concur with Mr. Harris here. There are many unique forms of meditation and the practice itself has evolved from myriad different branches of philosophy and religion. In Zen Buddhism, there is zazen, or sitting meditation. This is the form I espouse, although there are other forms that provide their own benefits. Bodhicitta is a Sanskrit word which is interpreted to mean Beginner’s Mind or Awakening Heart. A key element of experiencing bodhicitta is attentiveness to each moment, in each moment. Thich Nhat Hanh once said something along the lines of, “if you miss the moment, you miss your life.”

Meditation is about being present in each moment. You’ve definitely heard that kitsch phrase before, but I find it a lot easier said than done. Try it. Find a comfortable seat and settle in. Aim your eyes downward, or completely close them at the risk of accidentally falling asleep (I can’t say that hasn’t happened to me once or twice). Then, notice. Notice any sounds that might arise around you; let them come and let them go. Notice how your body feels, if you’re needlessly tense in certain areas (you probably are, and that’s okay). Notice the temperature of the room, if you can. Just notice things, letting them come and go. Don’t hurry them or ignore them. Focus on your breath. I’ll admit, it’s harder than you might think. But if you get off track, if your mind begins to wander, that’s okay. Just redirect your attention to your breath. Keep on doing that, and you’re strengthening your ability to concentrate.

Right concentration is one of the steps in the Eightfold Path, which is what the Buddha proposes as the path to end suffering. Right concentration involves the concept of samadhi, meaning oneness with the object of meditation. Samadhi is not hyper-focusing on one thing, feeling, or sensation. Samadhi is regarded in Hinduism as the final stage of meditation, so don’t feel frustrated if you fail to comprehend it or realize it in your practice. Rather, I offer this information in hopes to inspire you to look into right concentration, the Eightfold Path and meditation.

If you do, you might find yourself more present in each moment. You might find that you are better at redirecting your attention to the task at hand, to the present. You might find that the prospect of endlessly scrolling through social media loses its appeal; that you feel less drained by technology and more in control of your digital footprint. You might find yourself more self aware. And in the end, I hope you find wisdom and compassion in each moment.

mclaughline7@lasalle.edu